Life as a Performance: The Ups and Downs of Marina Abramovich, whose art turns the audience inside out

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Marina Abramovich is one of the most influential representatives of performance art in the 20th century. Her work consists of personal experiences, feelings and emotions that literally turn the souls of the audience inside out, forcing not only to empathize with the main character of the performance, but also to reflect on her own life and the fact that sometimes gnaws so hard and haunts.

Marina grew up in rather strange circumstances. She was born in Yugoslavia - Belgrade, Serbia in 1945. Her parents became prominent figures in the Yugoslav government after World War II, their careers, positions in power and an unstable marriage affected the girl's upbringing. Therefore, the parental role fell mainly on the shoulders of her grandmother, who was incredibly spiritualized.

Despite the militaristic origins of her parents, Marina was always interested in art and received encouragement from her mother, who supported her in these hobbies as best she could. It all started when Marina drew airplanes flying over airbases (this was where her parents worked), thus embodying her traumatic dreams on paper.

Marina's first attempt at performance art turned out to be “The One That Never Was”. The idea behind this work was that Marina had to invite members of the public to enter the gallery, take off their clothes and wait naked until she washes their clothes, and then return them after washing.

Although this performance did not take place, the outline of this talk clearly demonstrated that even in the early stages of her career, Marina had a desire to explore ideas related to family life, household and personal connections, as well as the subsequent relationships between each of these concepts. … Unfortunately, in her homeland, her work did not find success and recognition, so she soon moved to the West to establish herself as an avant-garde performance artist.

Gradually, she began to appear with her performances in galleries and theaters, and in 1973, representatives and organizers of the Edinburgh Fringe drew attention to her, and since then her fame in the Western art world began to flourish.

It was at the Fringe that Marina's series of performances, known as the Rhythm Series, began, in which she played a knife game, often known as "pin-finger", in which a knife is thrust into the table between finger slits at increasing speed. Marina played this game until she cut herself twenty times, and then played back the audio recording of this game in order to repeat what was happening earlier with maximum accuracy. This presentation was one of her first attempts to explore the limits (or lack thereof) of human physical and mental stress. This formed the basis of her performance series, where everyone could take part in this game.

Rhythm 0, for example, was a game in which Marina placed seventy-two objects on a table with instructions for the audience to use in any way they wanted. Visitors smeared her with olive oil, tore at her clothes, and eventually even pointed a loaded pistol at her head.

While in Holland and creating a series of rhythms, Marina began a relationship with the artist Uwe Laysiepen (known simply as Ulay). Their work looked at the relationship between men and women in love. She explored the complex dynamics often involved in this relationship, and they often used physical pain as a metaphor and manifestation of it. Marina and Ulai literally sorted out the relationship on stage, either shouting at each other in turn, standing in incredible proximity, or literally colliding their foreheads with each other at full speed.

The powerful chemistry that made the couple's performances so thrilling came to an end in their last performance together as they departed from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China to meet in the middle. In itself, this is a vivid demonstration of devotion between two lovers. However, their relationship ended abruptly after Ulay began to show signs of attention with one of the colleagues, with whom they worked for several years on the eve of the performance.

Marina's work is so extraordinary that it causes a lot of controversy and controversy. But there is one piece of art that has caused much more noise than any other. Her series, Spiritual Cooking, led to accusations of Satanism and cult membership that were particularly difficult to get rid of.

The accusations stem from her involvement with Pizzagate when emails were leaked between Abramovich and Tony Podesta. All this led to the fact that Marina began to be accused of involvement and complicity in the vile practices of which Podesta and his accomplices were accused. It has even been suggested that Abramovich played a special role as the satanic spiritual leader of the group.

While this caused a storm among many right-wing factions in the American press, Marina did her best to distance herself from these accusations, stating that her series of works, Spiritual Cooking, is about exploring concepts related to ritual and spirituality. queue has always been the main theme of her work.

In 2010, Marina was invited to host a major retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The show was called "The Artist Is Present", since Marina was literally a part of the exhibition and took part in the play during its entire time.

For three months, she spent seven hours a day sitting in an armchair and receiving visitors from all over the world. The play was documented in a film that shared its title. It captures the physical and mental toll the show has inflicted on Marina, and captures only a fraction of the many powerful and emotional interactions that the performance provided. Most notably, the film captured the touching moment when Ulay walked up and sat down opposite Marina in the gallery.

The faces of the participants were also documented by photographer Marco Anelli. He took a picture of each person who sat with Marina, and recorded how long they sat together. A selection of portraits from this collection was later presented in a photo book by Anelli, who received permission to use these images for personal purposes.

Marina was to conduct another retrospective, this time at the Royal Academy in the summer of 2020. However, events in the world caused by the COVID-19 pandemic forced the performance to be postponed until 2021. It is not yet known exactly what this exhibition will consist of. But there are rumors that the work will represent a direction associated with changes in her body over time.

The exhibition of Marina Abramovich, of course, will feature most of the works mentioned above in the form of photographs and documentaries. In doing so, she will again debate around one of the most central debates in the history of performance - how important physical and temporal presence is in the perception of a performance, and whether technology changes how we interact with it. But be that as it may, and whatever Marina has prepared for the sophisticated viewer this time, the show, as always, promises to be emotionally bright and extraordinary, because in the case of Abramovich it does not happen otherwise.

Continuing the topic of women's achievements, read also about like paintings celebrating the beauty of black women, provoked a scandal, causing general discontent, thereby making the work of Harmony Rosales recognizable all over the world.